Technology

Google has officially announced that it is opening an AI center in Beijing, China. The confirmation comes after months of speculation fueled by a major push to hire AI talent inside the country. Google’s search engine is blocked in China, but the company still has hundreds of staff in China which work on its international services. In reference to that ...

Apple has quietly allowed developers to make their apps available for pre-order. It’s a basic feature — as Android fanatics will point out — but nevertheless one that has been missing from the App Store. Upcoming apps will now be allowed to list in the App Store as far out as 90 days ahead of their launch and as close ...

Coinbase is growing up fast — or at least trying to. As an emblem of its current effort to accommodate the massive demand on its platform, the mainstream U.S. cryptocurrency exchange just added Facebook Vice President of Messaging Products David Marcus to its board of directors. Coinbase announced the news in a post on Medium. Thrilled to join the @Coinbase ...

Facebook is trying to close the augmented reality gap with Snapchat with the help of an army of third-party developers. Today, eight months after debuting its Augmented Reality Camera Effects platform and AR Studio tool at F8, Facebook is allowing all developers to start building AR experiences for its Facebook Camera. That includes “World Effects” — Facebook’s copy of Snapchat’s ...

It seems like forever ago that Apple first teased the iMac Pro, the souped up, professional grade version of its all-in-one. Announced back at WWDC, the company promised the computer would arrive sometime in December, and in spite a few months of near radio silence on that front, it looks like it’s about to deliver. The dark gray desktop will ...

Twitter today is announcing the launch of a new feature that will allow people to more easily post tweetstorms – that is, those series of connected tweets that have grown to become a popular workaround for getting past Twitter’s character count limitation in order to share longer thoughts. The company confirmed last month it was testing the feature – which it’s ...

Twitch, the Amazon-owned video game streaming service, is now available on Alexa. The company says it has launched a new skill for Alexa device owners that will allow Twitch users to track their favorite video creators and be notified when they start streaming, as well as discover new games and channels, among other things. The skill seems best designed for ...

Facebook today said it is shifting to a “local selling structure” in countries outside of the U.S., in which its advertising revenue in that country will be recorded by their local company in the country. That means that rather than directly route its revenue to its international headquarters in Dublin, local policymakers and governments will potentially get an opportunity for ...

The unbundling of the cable media empire is well underway, as players like Netflix grow and others like Hulu and YouTube offer live TV service. YouTube TV, in particular, is executing an aggressive rollout, just yesterday making the service available to another 34 markets. That brings us to a total of 83 U.S. markets in which YouTube TV is currently ...

This week Netflix trumpeted its users collectively streaming one billion hours of content weekly in 2017. Also this week: Netflix reminded its ~110M global subscribers that while they’re paying to watch the content available on its platform, Netflix is busy watching what they’re watching… To the 53 people who’ve watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who ...